Friday, 10 February 2012

We witness that today very large percentage of e-mail traffic and also a significant number of web sites are infected by malicious code that may attack your system. These days, it is hard to imagine any serious system without some form of virus protection running. Things like Trojans, worms, spyware, denial of service attacks (DOS), etc. are very common. I guess that may be one of the reasons virus scanners and registry cleaners are invented - to fight those attacks and to keep intruders away from the system. So this is pretty common knowledge, but not everybody is aware that settings in virus scanners and registry cleaners could be adjusted not to be so aggressive towards all services that may be running.

These scanners/cleaners basically scan each incoming package of code and if they notice something suspicious they may block some of them or even remove them. That may cause some other issues such as that your program suddenly could stops working or you may see some error messages. Sometimes turning the scanner off or running AutoCAD in diagnostic mode may reveal if there is a conflict with third party apps which scanners basically are - third party applications.

Other times, the damage is done since some registry keys may be identified as threat and removed. In that case you may need to run repair of your software to resolve it. I guess, that is one more reason why we suggest that virus scanners be turned off when installing. It is surely a good idea to review the documentation and see what could be done about that.

To show it in one example I found a case reported to us earlier where customer wanted to migrate Survey Database created in 2010 version of Civil 3D (back in that version we used Microsoft Access for Survey Database) to Civil 3D 2012 (now, 2011 and 2012 use SQL for Survey database storage). We blogged about it some year and a half ago in this post. 2011 Preview: Survey Database Changes in Civil 3D 2011.

So, when our client attempted to migrate his Survey database he got this message:

I managed to reproduce the same error you have by removing following registry key.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Classes\CLSID\{DAB3F62B-9EE6-4827-9D2F-3BBEE943C523}\LocalServer32. Which basically told me that something removed it from customer’s system, especially if it used to work.

So to resolve the issue we have to either find and export this registry key from any working machines and importing it in your troubled machine or by running repair of your install from Control panel>Programs and Features.

Note: Make sure you back up all registry keys you are editing or removing, in case something should happen and you need it back.

1. On working machine go Start> type REGEDIT to get into registry editor

If this key is not missing you may need to check your permissions, because if the registry key is missing migration should fail instantly. If it is properly registered and takes some time to fail it suggests there is something wrong in the environment that is preventing the server from starting. Possibly a dependency or a permissions issue. It might be helpful to check about the users permissions and their UAC settings. Beyond that, you can check their permissions on the directories where the migration application is installed.

Comments

We witness that today very large percentage of e-mail traffic and also a significant number of web sites are infected by malicious code that may attack your system. These days, it is hard to imagine any serious system without some form of virus protection running. Things like Trojans, worms, spyware, denial of service attacks (DOS), etc. are very common. I guess that may be one of the reasons virus scanners and registry cleaners are invented - to fight those attacks and to keep intruders away from the system. So this is pretty common knowledge, but not everybody is aware that settings in virus scanners and registry cleaners could be adjusted not to be so aggressive towards all services that may be running.

These scanners/cleaners basically scan each incoming package of code and if they notice something suspicious they may block some of them or even remove them. That may cause some other issues such as that your program suddenly could stops working or you may see some error messages. Sometimes turning the scanner off or running AutoCAD in diagnostic mode may reveal if there is a conflict with third party apps which scanners basically are - third party applications.